Blood On The Tracks 05 | The Driver

This is an ABC podcast.

If you're an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person, we want you to know that this series contains the name of someone who has died.

The inquest into Mark Haynes' death unearthed a lot of suspicious evidence, but it didn't answer the central questions in this case.

What happened to Mark Haynes after he left the nightclub with his mates,

and how did he end up dead on the railway tracks in the early hours of the morning?

The case went cold for over two decades and those questions were left hanging.

Then I met Faye.

He couldn't even kill a rat, but I think he was involved.

I'm Alan Clark and this is Unravel Blood on the Tracks, an investigation into the death of Aboriginal teenager Mark Haynes.

In this episode, fresh evidence that Mark wasn't alone at the tracks that night.

After Mark's inquest returned an open finding, his family were pretty much forgotten about.

The police stopped calling and all the unanswered questions ate away at his family.

We couldn't pick ourselves up from this, so I was just blaming myself.

The DIY investigating by the uncles had failed to find any solid answers.

They'd stepped on a lot of toes.

Uncle Jack remembers fearing for his family.

People used to drive around, coming down our street, you know, park there.

They was looking for duck.

We had to sit in the dark while duck was sitting out the front with a gun.

It became too much for Jack and his family, and they moved away from Tamworth.

Yeah, that's it.

I don't know if I'm paranoid or not, but

you make your family, get your family close to you.

What's happened to Mark might happen to us.

The two people who felt the loss of Mark's life the most were Mark's parents, Josie and Ron Haynes Sr.

You haven't heard from them because they passed away years ago.

His mother died of a broken heart.

She died young, I think, age of 47.

She took her to her grave.

Ron, he was quiet all that time, a broken heart too.

I know they'll try to, you know, to be there for me and Ron, but they just weren't the same after Mark's passed away.

Yeah.

Lorna and Ron Haynes Jr.

are Mark's younger brother and sister.

He just drank and drank and drank dandy.

Yeah.

After Mark passed away, he used to drink before, but he just drank more and more.

I tried to save him.

But you could have never have known any of that would have happened, you know.

It's not your fault.

The family never gave up.

Five, ten, twenty years after Mark died, they were still searching for answers.

On the 25th anniversary of his death, Duck was still appealing to the public to come forward with information.

And that's when I covered the story for the first time.

The unsolved death of 17-year-old Mark Haynes in Tamworth in 1988 left a devastated family seeking answers.

Alan Clark investigates.

Tamworth police have told Living Black that Mark's case has been suspended with no action.

After that first visit to see Mark's family, the story never let me go.

I became convinced, like Duck, that this was a major injustice.

The paperwork piled up in my living room.

I took the case with me from job to job, convincing editors to let me tell Mark's story.

And then, I got my first big lead.

Remember back in episode one, I found out that Mark was seen with a guy called Terry Souter on the night he died.

When you saw him on the steps, who was he with?

Terry Souter, yeah.

And you're pretty sure he was with Terry Souter.

Terry was sitting to the right of Mark.

I still remember that.

The big lead was this.

Terry Souter's mum called me.

She'd seen my reporting and she said she had something to tell me about her son.

We're going to meet Faith Souter.

I met with her

last night and she was like, she just said, I want to talk.

She wants to help Duck and his family get justice.

So, this is a big lead.

So, I'm very keen to get Faye, Terry's mum, and talk to her about what she knows.

I sit down with Faye at her house in West Tamworth.

I can tell she's nervous about speaking to me.

She's got short brown hair and a round, welcoming face.

She speaks about her son with a raw kind of warmth.

Gentle, fun-loving, do anything for anybody.

But after a while she steals herself as if she's about to tell me something important.

Well I think Terry was with all these

people

and

he

was the driver of the car.

that manoeuvred everybody to and from the dumping of Mark Haynes's body.

From what we gather and what we've heard is that Terry did not know Mark Haynes was in the boot of a car and taken out to the warrel silos, put on the railway track.

It's a surprise to hear Faye say that her own son was involved.

She slowly cobbled together this story from what other people have told her.

But this isn't just rumor, she says.

Because some of this information comes from someone close to her.

Someone she trusts, a relative.

This relative told Faye that he wants to remain anonymous.

He didn't see how Mark died, and he didn't see Mark in the boot of Terry's car, but he did see Mark's body.

Early on the morning of Mark's death, this relative, who was just a 14-year-old boy at the time, says he was woken up by Terry.

The boy notices that Terry seems scared or agitated, like something terrible has happened.

But Terry's not saying much.

He just tells his relative to get up and takes him out to the tracks.

Despite the humid night, Terry has his favorite red jacket with him.

There's a bit of drizzle around as they get to the tracks.

Terry tells the relative to keep his distance.

Terry wouldn't allow him to go

close and you're also worried about his safety.

The young relative hangs back and watches Terry walk up the gravel incline.

Terry's shadow is moving around a figure lying on the tracks.

Terry takes his favorite red jacket and does something strange.

Terry had

folded it and put it under Mark's head on the railway track.

And that's all the relative saw.

The boy was just left with this haunting memory of watching from a distance as Terry moved around a body on the tracks.

I think I'm standing around about where that boy was standing.

And

if you're out here at night, and they would have been out here at night, right now it is really, really dark, but you can still make out the train tracks.

And next to me is a highway, so

lots of cars coming through, and that's lighting up bits of track.

So, so yeah, this boy looked down and saw Terry

sort of crouched over doing something to this body's head.

And I think that body was Mark Haynes.

And he says that Terry put a red jacket on Mark's head and the police never found a red jacket at all.

So I'm just wondering whether or not what he saw was actually a towel.

But if Mark and Terry were friends, it just makes me wonder what

what was going through Terry's Terry's mind.

Why come back out here?

I mean, and certainly

when you hear what the boy said, which is it looked like Terry was comforting Mark, you can't help but think that he came back out here to either see if Mark was still alive and maybe help him or put a towel under his head to make people realize that Mark didn't come out here alone.

And we'll never really know what happened out here that night.

We can't ask Terry because six months after Mark died, Terry was found dead in his bedroom.

This is my son's box, I call it.

I made it myself out of a shoebox.

It's got just little bits and pieces and

information and things like that in there.

Terry took his own life at home in July 1988.

He was alone.

The rest of the family was out celebrating his cricket team's grand final win.

Terry had left the celebrations early, telling his mum that he was going home to cook dinner.

That's Terry's final

message.

So, this is his suicide note.

His suicide note.

It's just a little yellow note.

Do you want to read that for me?

I will.

Love you all, but can't handle life.

Love Terry.

For Faye, Terry's suicide came out of the blue, and she's spent the last few decades asking why.

You never know with suicide.

What's on a person's mind?

Why?

I think I'm coming close to my answer.

Faye shows me some photos of Terry.

He's young with a blonde mullet.

He looks a bit like David Bowie.

I notice that his hair has a slight curl to it.

The passenger in the front seat had blonde hair, curly.

They all look to be young fellows to me.

So maybe, just maybe, Terry was in that car that was hooning around the time and the place where Mark was last seen.

Faye thinks Terry wouldn't have hurt Mark, but she seems sure that he was involved somehow or was there.

She believes that there was a group of teenagers there that night, and that one or more of them have been holding on to a dark secret for decades.

I mean, these kids of Terry's age, you know,

they're all teenagers,

and to think

someone's done this

and left me

in pain

for 30 years and the Craigie family.

30 years we've had to live with it.

Doesn't go away.

Faye heard that before Terry's death he wrote three letters to people close to him.

These letters are rumoured to detail exactly what happened to Mark.

Since hearing this, I've tried hard to track down those letters, with no luck.

He He couldn't do anything, he couldn't even kill a rat, but I think he was involved and to me that's what he would have meant on his letter by life is too hard to live, because he could not have handled anything like that.

When Faye first told me about all of this, I was wondering why she hadn't come forward with this information years ago.

I was surprised to hear Faye say that she had gone to the cops over a decade ago.

A detective wanted to follow up with her in Tamworth, so Faye arranged to travel up from Sydney.

Yeah, it was a weekend.

My daughter and I hired a car, which he knew that we were doing,

and

we had to ring him up outside of town so that we could meet him.

somewhere, have a cup of coffee and have a chat.

But the meeting never happened.

He never answered his phone

and I've never spoken to him or seen him ever since.

Did you go into the police station in Tamworth and ask if he was there?

Yeah.

When I went in and asked a uniform officer behind the counter if I could speak to detective and he said, oh hang on a minute and

he went away, which naturally I thought, oh, he's gone to get him or something.

He came back and he said, no, there's no such detective here.

So I just took him at his word.

We did speak to this detective.

He does exist.

And he denies that this happened.

He says he never would have avoided people wanting to make a statement.

The history of Mark's case seems to be full of moments like these when people come forward with crucial information.

And maybe behind the scenes, the police were doing all sorts of work, trying to make use of the new leads.

But to the people on the outside, it just looked like they didn't care.

Duck was annoyed to find out that there was a new lead that hadn't been followed up, but he wasn't surprised.

It's what I would expect from this local command of investigators.

It made him angry to hear that Faye had first gone to the police about this over a decade ago.

She, quite a few years years previously, contacted the police

and told them that her son was driving that motor vehicle and possibly Mark was in the boot.

When Faye came forward a second time after seeing my reporting, one of Duck's goals was finally realized.

The police reopened the case.

But that optimism quickly turned into frustration.

Months went by and the police still hadn't taken a formal statement from Faye.

We'd been told the case was active again, but there didn't seem to be much investigating going on.

I was starting to get a taste of the frustration that Duck had felt all these years, and it was really getting to me.

I had to do something about it.

I called New South Wales Greens MP, David Shoebridge.

And the call was, there's been years of work regarding the death of a young Aboriginal boy just south of Tamworth and there was a request for help.

I knew that he was a criminal barrister who'd handled cases like this in the past and I was interested in how he'd respond to this story.

I asked him if he'd come and meet Mark's family.

Could I get up to Tamworth?

Could I meet with this character called Duck and see what if anything I could do?

So I said yes.

Next thing I know, I'm meeting this extraordinary bloke.

And once you meet him, once you start hearing the story, how could you not keep campaigning for it?

He was genuinely interested, he was genuinely concerned about how this investigation, if you call it that, has taken so long.

Dave even said that, look, this matter would have been, you know, if they were professional, he said this would have been resolved in a matter of weeks.

I gave David a copy of the inquest transcript.

Like me, he was stunned by the behaviour of the police.

The explanation from the police about this young man's death never held water.

Even the most cursory scrutiny would have said that it was a farcical explanation.

It was almost as though the police shrugged their shoulders and said, Nyah, you know how it is.

Young Aboriginal men, they just walk away, lie down on railway tracks, and wait to get hit by a freight train.

That's actually their answer.

Not looking at it as a family that deserves answers for their grief and their loss.

Just, yeah, young black kids, they line down in front of railway trains.

The first thing David David Shoebridge did was try to go and see police in Tamworth.

Well, as an MP, if you're going into an area and you're going to start questioning how a particular government agency has worked, I take it as part of what I should do is I give them the courtesy of telling them I'll be in the patch and saying, I'd like to pop in and get your side of the story, find out what's been happening.

And I did exactly that with the police here.

I said I'd be up there with the family and we wanted to attend with the family to get some direct answers.

The police declined to meet with them.

That wasn't 1988.

That was just two years ago.

I was there at the time watching it all.

David and Duck are peas in a pod.

They're both fighters.

I wasn't surprised when they staged a protest right out the front of the station.

Justice Walmart and we want the truth on what really happened to him to be unearthed.

This isn't right.

That families have to go out of their own way to investigate what they believe is very serious crime.

Put your finger around, Attorney General, State Government.

I mean, we had a press conference out the front and basically shame them into meeting with me and Duck.

They got the meeting, but things quickly turned sour.

Duck and David demanded to know why the explosive information from Faye Souter hadn't been followed up.

Duck is saying, well, did you contact this witness whose name and details and numbers I gave you?

And non-answers coming back from the police.

Yeah, well, Dave asks about her statement and why it wasn't acted upon earlier.

And then I said, well, it's a very simple question.

You know, you've had these contact numbers, you've had these details.

Have you actually arranged and had a face-to-face meeting and actually interviewed them?

The police reacted by saying, don't tell us how to do our job.

I said, I'm not trying to tell you how to do your job.

I'm just trying to find out if you've done anything.

That meeting failed to ease 28 years of tension between the family and police.

The cops didn't concede any wrongdoing.

After that, David Shoebridge grew frustrated with police in the Oxley Local Area Command.

This required the attention of broader media, it required the attention of the state government.

I saw how we weren't going to get anywhere, just banging our heads against the wall of the Oxley Local Area Command.

Mr.

David Shoebridge.

Mr President, on the 16th of January 1988, in the early hours of the morning, a 17-year-old Aboriginal boy, Mark Anthony Haynes, was found dead on the train tracks outside Tamworth.

So I came back and I raised it squarely in Parliament.

I put on record what we knew to that point about Mark's death and demanded a separate state Crime Command investigation, the homicide squad effectively, because I knew if we just left it there at Oxley, nothing would happen.

The case remains open, but for the family and community to have faith in the police investigation, there needs to be a break with the past.

For this reason, I am today writing to the New South Wales Police Commissioner seeking to have the investigation.

Two months later, on the 29th anniversary of Mark's death,

New South Wales Police announced the State Homicide Squad would review the investigation.

There's movement on the coal case of Tamworth teenager Mark Haynes.

The family has been calling for the case to be moved from the Oxley Local Area Command to the state's homicide squad and today they got what they've been asking for.

And I understand that the state crime command are willing to conduct a review of the investigation.

With the case active again, the next step was getting the police to commit to a reward.

But as was becoming standard with this case, if the police didn't act, the family wouldn't wait.

Last year, Uncle Jack stumped up $20,000 of his own money as a reward in the hope it would encourage someone to come forward.

I love to put $20,000 of my own money

to

any information to lead up to arrest, you know, just

try and solve this mystery.

No one came forward to claim the $20,000, but the police had been spurred into action and they were finally making plans to announce a reward of their own.

The 16th of January this year was the 30th anniversary of Mark's death.

It was always going to be a big day for Mark's family, but none of us were really prepared for just how big a day it would be.

The police had called a press conference to make an announcement about the case.

We're outside the Tamworth police station.

just across the road.

People are gathering a small group of mostly Aboriginal community members.

They have posters that they've written up with the words, what happened to our boy Mark?

Gone but not forgotten.

And they're pinning a small black and white photograph of Mark

with

the colours of the Aboriginal flag.

in ribbons onto each other's shirts and they're going to head across to the police station where the police will give a statement.

Welcome everyone this morning to Tamworth Police Station and today is a significant day.

It commemorates the death of young Tamworth man Mark Haynes in 1988, 30 years ago today.

Significantly,

we can announce today a major reward has been offered.

of half a million dollars to assist police and the family in getting some resolution on Mark's death.

While it was three decades overdue, the family were happy there was finally a reward on the table.

And we very much appreciate

this substantial reward being offered today,

which is a day of very significance to us.

And as I've said, this is a community issue.

This boy belonged to the community of Tamworth.

And no family should have to go through through the anguish of not knowing what has happened to their loved ones.

It was a roller coaster day for the family.

The police reward announcement that morning was a high point, but the afternoon would be more somber.

They had to head over to the cemetery to finally lay Mark to rest.

Just a few weeks before all of this, I'd found out that 13 tissue samples taken from Mark's organs were still being housed at the coroner's court in Sydney.

The family knew nothing of their existence until I told them.

Now they were about to cremate those last remains.

For Mark's brother and sister, Ron and Lorna, it was a bittersweet moment.

I suppose it's a journey that you'd never have to make, right?

And 30 years.

It's a long time, it's too long.

Not knowing.

That afternoon at the cemetery, a smoking ceremony was held and speeches were made.

We hope one day

we may be able to replace the plaque that's on here right now

where it

is stated, mysteriously died 161, 1988.

Hopefully, that day will come while I am still

upon this earth,

and I would like to see that change, which means to say we will truly be at the end of our journey.

For Aboriginal people, including the Gomorrai, it's important to be buried whole on country.

For 30 years, Mark's body remained incomplete, which means his spirit couldn't rest.

Now he was finally at peace.

Do you feel things like might happen this year?

I mean, hopefully.

Got a good feeling, you know.

Yeah, I've got a good feeling too, yeah, about it, you know.

Something's, you know,

has gotta come, you know.

So

from the reward announcement in the morning to the burial in the afternoon, it was a pretty huge day for Mark's family.

And by the time the sun was setting, I also felt completely overwhelmed by everything that had happened.

It's around 7.30 p.m.

and I'm lying on my hotel bed in Tamworth.

I'm absolutely shattered.

I didn't count on how

emotional I would feel and I don't like talking about

the emotional toll that

it takes on me sometimes because

it's not my pain to have.

You know, I'm here for the family to give them a platform.

And sometimes I become part of the family, and then sometimes I am the journalist.

It's very hard to go between the two sometimes, but I'm incredibly privileged and honoured to be able to share their story.

Having been with the family for the past five years,

When I first spoke with them, nobody listened to them.

Not the police, not a politician, no one.

And to

be here and seeing the police announce a $500,000 reward,

it's kind of surreal actually.

And then when we went to the cemetery to see the family, I think it was like

popping a cork off a bottle.

Like the emotion just flowed.

It was almost as if they had to do a second funeral.

It was

a very, very special moment because

black fathers look after each other, we have to.

There is so much inequity between Aboriginal and non-Indigenous people that it's so important that we continue to maintain our tradition and look after our mob.

The 30th anniversary of Mark's death felt like a moment when everything crystallized, when everyone felt like they had hope again.

Since then, things have started to shift pretty dramatically in my investigation.

And people are coming forward to speak with me who've never spoken before.

In the next episode of Unravel,

she said that

had gotten drunk, had become very emotional, and had told her that he was there the night that Mark was dead and that he'd placed Mark's body on the tracks.

Head to abc.net.au slash truecrime to see a video that looks at the forensic evidence and explores the clues suggesting that Mark wasn't alone on the tracks.

If you know anything about those letters written by Terry Souter or anything else about this case, please get in touch.

We're already following up on some of the leads you've sent in.

Our email address is unraveltruecrime at abc.net.au.

If this story has raised concerns for you or someone you know anywhere in Australia, you can contact Lifeline on 131114.